Skepticism

EVENTS

Yet another TERFy oversimplification of reality

One does have to wonder if gender feminists and transgender activists are undermining science. One does, I guess, if one is going to properly apply critical thinking to these question. Unfortunately, that article by Debra Soh doesn’t seem to be interested in doing that, but instead on throwing around mischaracterizations of her critics. She fully embraces a tactic that Steven Pinker used in his book, The Blank Slate: let’s accuse those damnable “blank slaters” of believing that genes and biology play absolutely no role in brain and behavior, so that every bit of evidence that brains are made of meat refutes the cartoon extremists he is babbling about. He could have gone further, you know, and argued that the “blank slaters” believe that the skull contains nothing but cotton candy and whipped cream and meringue, so that any photograph of a brain in a bucket is a thorough disproof.

Debra Soh does the same thing. Let the strawmanning begin!

Gender feminists — who are distinct from traditional equity feminists — refuse to acknowledge the role of evolution in shaping the human brain, and instead promote the idea that sex differences are caused by a socialization process that begins at birth. Gender, according to them, is a construct; we are born as blank slates and it is parents and society at large that produce the differences we see between women and men in adulthood.

No. See, this is the difficult thing about dealing with these people: they immediately make a stark dichotomy, trying to pretend that one side, theirs, recognizes the importance of biology to the human mind, while the other side simply denies any role at all by biology and genetics. It’s annoying. I just have to say that the nature:nurture debate is fucking dead, that all influences are significant and inseparable in generating the complexity of the organism, and that these people with an inflamed notion of the black and white nature of the contributions to development belong back in the 19th century.

Gender is a construct built around probabilities in the disposition of traits associated with sex; most of the stereotypes are nothing but cultural impositions. There is no biological basis for girls wearing dresses and having long hair; boys don’t have a genetic predisposition to wearing pants and having their hair cut shorter. But there certainly are biases in brain development generated by hormones, for instance, biases that can also be overwhelmed by cultural influences. Could girls have a lesser potential for doing higher mathematics, on average? Maybe. But the evidence isn’t available, because social constraints have discouraged women from pursuing math for generations. Women could be better, on average, than men at math, but we wouldn’t know it because of all the baggage they’ve been forced to carry.

By the way, she does include a link to her claim that gender feminists refuse to acknowledge the role of evolution in shaping the human brain — again, I don’t know anyone who would make such an absurd claim, but it’s a staple of the kind of false characterization constantly perpetrated by the biological determinists (see? I can use misleading labels as well as they can). You might imagine it would be a link to some feminist claiming that brains are made of cotton candy and whipped cream and meringue, but no — it is to an evolutionary psychology journal article that also claims that feminists fails to consider evolutionary accounts of psychological sex differences. No evidence given.

I will tender the hypothesis, however, that gender feminists have evolved to avoid circle jerks.

Let us continue to see the caricatures drawn…

The idea that our brains are identical sounds lovely…

What? Why? I like the fact that people are different. And also, I don’t know anyone who argues that all brains are identical.

but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Many studies, for instance, have documented the masculinizing effects of prenatal testosterone on the developing brain. And a recent study in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports showed that testosterone exposure alters the programming of neural stem cells responsible for brain growth and sex differences.

Yes, yes, we all know this. These facts are only relevant if you’re arguing with your cartoon feminist who thinks brains are not influenced by genes or hormones.

Gender feminists often point to a single study, published in 2015, which claimed it isn’t possible to tell apart male and female brains. But when a group of researchers reanalyzed the underlying data, they found that brains could be correctly identified as female or male with 69% to 77% accuracy. In another study, published in 2016, researchers used a larger sample in conjunction with higher-resolution neuroimaging and were able to successfully classify a brain by its sex 93% of the time.

Warning sign again: she doesn’t link to that single study which we often point to. I don’t think I’ve ever pointed to such a study. I participated in a histological study of mouse brains way back when I was a student, and we found a measurable, statistical difference in the size of cells in a certain area of the brain between males and females. The curious thing is that I spent month staring into a microscope measuring sections — I was the data collection grunt — and at no point could I have sexed a mouse brain from looking at it. I did trust that the statistics were valid, though.

So I’m a bit doubtful about their claims of accuracy. I believe there are statistically detectable differences, but that they’re not as absolute as claimed.

Further, I would not claim that the 0.8% is embedded somewhere in that unclassifiable 7%; I suspect a lot of transgender individuals, when scored by the anatomical metric of their brain, just as if we scored them by their genitals, would be ranked as solidly male or female…on that one metric, which says nothing about how their brains function. What are you going to do, deny that someone’s sexual orientation is valid because their nucleus magnocellularis lit up on one MRI reading?

That’s the whole problem with this approach: deny the whole because of your interpretation of a part. You have a Y chromosome, therefore you are male. You have a vagina, therefore you are female. You like football, therefore you are male. Your brain has this particular shape, therefore you are female. It’s ridiculous. Just the fact that there are a thousand easily measured parameters for gender, and they are only loosely correlated with one another, ought to tell you that trying to find the one, single, infallible metric is a fool’s errand.

Soh has more shoehorning to do, though.

In my experience, proponents touting the “blank slate” view are willing to agree, in private conversations, that neurological sex differences do exist, but they fear that acknowledging as much publicly will justify female oppression. This is backward. As it stands, female-typical traits are seen as inferior and less worthy of respect. This is the real issue the movement fails to address: Nobody wants to be female-typical, not even women.

Wrong again. There are no “blank slaters”. There are people who will publicly assert that there are both cultural and biological elements to sex and gender — they’re not going to whisper that as a dirty secret to you in private. And the claim that we see female-typical behaviors as inferior is false. What is objectionable is the belief, so blithely taken for granted by people like Soh, that you can tell someone what is typical. No one wants to be female-typical, as defined by the determinists, because they stuff that definition with a lot of crap, so that they can have it both ways: If you’re typical, you’re weak, passive, a good help-meet to your spouse; but if you’re strong, assertive, and independent, you’re not typical, that is you are bad at being a woman. You cannot win.

Unlike gender feminists, transgender activists firmly believe that gender is a biological, rather than social, reality — but of course they don’t believe that it’s necessarily tied to sex at birth. They also believe that gender identity is quite stable early on, warranting a transition not only for transgender adults, but also young children who say they were born in the wrong body.

I give up. Has this person actually talked with any transgender activistås? Because they’ll have a range of perspectives, and will almost always recognize that these issues are complex — there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all formula for how people manage their gender identity. Yet here is Soh, acting as if they’re a uniform ideological bloc. It’s dishonest and demeaning.

But then, this kind of dishonesty is exactly like what comes out of right-wing think tanks: cast doubt on the complexity of the real science, while insisting that their bogus, overly-simplified version of reality is the True Science. We also get that from creationists, claiming the scientific high ground while puking up total bullshit. That’s what makes these kinds of claims galling:

Distortion of science hinders progress. When gender feminists start refuting basic biology, people stop listening, and the larger point about equality is lost.

You also punch yourself in the face when you try to imply that gender is merely basic biology. It’s not. It’s advanced and complex neurobiology, psychology, and sociology, and it’s your reductive attitude that it’s simply biology that is the grandest distortion of science.

“Gender feminist” was coined by Christina Hoff Sommers in the 1990’s for anyone who questioned gender roles. She claimed it was a newfangled thing, but “equity feminists” were always the fringe group. The only examples that come to mind are the “New Feminists” of the 1920’s and “Difference feminism” dating from the 1980’s. Neither made much impact.

I think that one of the bigger problems of Feminism is being often confused, by misinformed people, has some kind of equivalent to machismo.
I, until my 18-19 years old, thought the same that too much people still think today: feminism like some kind of “woman superiority movement”.
Of course, i learned (educating myself about the subject; and i am a bit curious about a lot of things) what feminism really his.
Maybe, just maybe, if all people that is a feminist (and, in my opinion, any man and woman that fight for a better world must be a feminist) try to explain better what is feminism, that we want true equality between genders, and there is none “better” or “superior” gender, maybe, just maybe, we can make a much fair and enjoyable world for future generations.

All groups have their fringe lunatics. Why should feminism and gender issues in general be any different? I once tried to read up on radical feminism, and that was …um… fun (like “penetration is rape”). But even if your straw men are real it’s still not a useful contribution.

The more I learn about biology the more fuzzy the picture gets. Sure, one can categorize traits and behavior in arbitrary groups, perhaps even find natural distribution curves, but none of this will tell you what ‘s “wrong” and whats “right”. It’s all just nature being what nature is, and we need to figure out how to deal with that the best we can.

It frustrates me considerably to see people like this Debra Soh talking about the influence of biology and culture on human behaviour and then saying practically nothing about the culture side. Apparently this issue can be determined by looking at studies in biology and biology alone.

Never mind the sociologists and historians who have studied culture and gender, and found substantial differences in how cultures have concieved of gender over space and time. Never mind that in Confucian cultures a desire for independence is considered a trait of the feminine and the immature, whereas an appreciation of proper societal interdependence is what grown-ups and men display. In American culture it is considered the opposite. In Medieval Europe women were considered to be more prone to drunkenness and sexual passion than men (the Aristotelian view), by the 19th century they were considered to have a greater moral seriousness and men were the naturally drunk and horny ones. In Classical Athens it was men who indulged in beauty contests and took pride in their physical appearance – women who did so were thought to be wasting their time (well, citizen women anyway – it was considered more normal for metic prostitutes). And up until the Restoration in England acting was considered a manly (if low-status) profession – by the 20th century it was seen as prissy and effeminate, the refuge of women and homosexuals.

So… is it that, in their eyes, these cultures aren’t doing gender roles properly? Where we, being modern and sophisticated and Western, and thus better than everyone else who has ever lived, intrinsically “get” gender? That our gender roles are clearly “natural”, where everyone else’s are artificial and skewed?

When some one claims that they can determine sex x% of the time from MRIs or whatever, I reminded of a podcast where someone said that the sex of human skeleton could be determined with 90% and then went on to put this number in context by pointing out that guessing had 50% accuracy.

Are equity feminists feminists who prefer to invest in stocks rather than fixed return instruments?

That’s the whole problem with this approach: deny the whole because of your interpretation of a part. You have a Y chromosome, therefore you are male. You have a vagina, therefore you are female. You like football, therefore you are male. Your brain has this particular shape, therefore you are female. It’s ridiculous.

That is ridiculous, but mostly because it willfully conflates biological sex determination, primary and (probably) secondary sex characters, and gender roles, none of which is synonymous with gender identity. The strength of correlation among these semi-independent concepts (which are caused and influenced by different ratios of nature and nurture) is exactly what’s at issue in all these discussions. Mixing them all up together like they’re the same thing is completely muddling and unhelpful.
In biology as a whole, ‘sex’ has only one consistent meaning: gametic sex, the production of eggs vs. sperm, and only two possible states, male and female. Any other definitions are clade-specific, being based on the process of sex determination, on primary sex characters, or on secondary sex characters. These are strongly correlated with gametic sex (within species), because of causal genetic/developmental and physiological processes, but it’s biology so of course there are rare exceptions to every correlation. We do’;t ever deal in nice neat absolute dichotomies in biology, there is too much that can go differently in complex developmental pathways. But rare exceptions do not obviate super-robust patterns.

Gender roles (behavior) and gender identity (psychology) are different and far more complex in that they are emergent properties of brains, and brains are much more susceptible to environmental/cultural influences than biological-sex markers. Here there are many open questions about genetic, hormonal, and cultural influences on brain structure and function and concomitant behavior. What galls me is the denial that these questions are, in fact, open.

Blank state does not exist? If not, what is universal brain death, when every neuron in the brain has finally died?
That’s essentially the only time a blank slate exists in the brain, as there are many, many, many interconnecting “circuits” already extant at birth and some relatively rudimentary, compared to other vertebrates, instinctive behaviors already present. Those are added to both by preexisting tendencies within the brain structures themselves, environmental experiences, learning, social interactions and factors that are still beyond our understanding, creating a complex web of interweaving behavioral traits that makes the individual.
Our failure as a society is our odd need to categorize individuals as a neat pigeonholed category of X, Y or Z. That isn’t the fault of any activist or science, but of the society that demands precise categories where such are utterly impossible.
Or more simply, psychology and behavior ain’t laws of physics.

Our failure as a society is our odd need to categorize individuals as a neat pigeonholed category of X, Y or Z.

You’ve just categorised societies as either failed or not — a rather neat pigeon-holing.

Blank state does not exist? If not, what is universal brain death, when every neuron in the brain has finally died?
That’s essentially the only time a blank slate exists in the brain, as there are many, many, many interconnecting “circuits” already extant at birth and some relatively rudimentary, compared to other vertebrates, instinctive behaviors already present.

If the concept of “a blank slate” refers to any state of being without instincts (surely you don’t mean to refer to autonomic function!), you have a rebuttal; if it refers to learned behaviours or mental content, then you don’t.

Sometimes I think I need a little rubber stamp, with Ben Goldacre’s* face on it, and the words, “I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that…” in a speech bubble underneath. The border should be christmas cake shaped. When coming across this kind of oversimplified bullshittery in defense of the unreasonable, I’d just stamp it on the top of the page and move along; my work there, done.
I relatively recently had a discussion where someone announced that they finally understood that “transgenderism was nonsense after reading Cordelia Fine’s ‘Delusions of Gender'” which could definitely have used that stamp – I can’t say for sure, since I’m only about 1/3 of the way through that book and have been distracted by old X-Men comics (from the era of extensive thought bubble exposition) in my reading time since I got to that point, but I’m fairly confident that nothing in that book actually addresses transness?

*Obviously the sentiment isn’t unique to him. I certainly heard or read others saying it and thought it myself often enough before him, It’s just that his way of saying it sticks in my head.

I walked a similar path to you, and about 16-18 years ago, I discovered the site of the Nizkor Project. At first glance, it seems a valid question: what does debunking of holocaust denial and information distribution with feminism?

It’s about the technique they started on Usenet. To promote the idea, that you’re the good guy, despite having the mannerisms of Alex Jones, play a classic bait and switch. Talk about the plight of people with as much fake compassion as possible, then pack all the hateful things you actually think into the representation of the group you wish to discredit. In relation to feminism, point out the issues they talk about on the academic level as if it’s something you represent, and contrast it with the most radical, or worst argued case by the opposition. What happens here is simple, outside people, who are masochists or have a guilt complex, humans don’t like to present themselves in a bad light. With enough time, it leads to such statements as ” we would like women to be in the STEM field, it’s just that they don’t apply, because women seem to be risk averse”.

The other well liked tactic is the application of fallacies, like, if I don’t like you as a person, your arguments are not valid, or because you can’t argue well, your arguments aren’t valid. They don’t lack information, they don’t care. When people identify as anti-PC or anti-SJW, what they actually want is a free pass to be an ignorant asshole.

It is also unfortunately not helped by the fact, that feminism, as a civilian and political social activism reached the point every large organization or movement reaches, the schism into subgroups. It’s fairly obvious, that social conservative or sex negative feminists want the opposite of what liberals and sex positive people want. Including the debate on the aims of feminists. Recently there was a flare up about one feminist, who is a theist, and has some dodgy views, Sarsour. However, one of her critics is Ali, who has dodgy views herself, and while an atheist, as a politician she was active in blocking immigrants from entering the Netherlands, or gain entry by instantly subjugating themselves to local demands. Instead of opening a discussion, where both good and bad things done by them could have been discussed in length, those feminists who spoke out took a stand in defending/condoning one or the other.

So, how can people dissociate themselves this easily? If you notice, certain Western democracies did not have a genocide against their own citizens/ethnicity in a long history, which is a good thing, but it also means not seeing the border they shouldn’t cross. This is why genocide denial, racial supremacy, and discrimination in words only is still protected as free speech. There’s a movement to establish eating disorders like anorexia as a diet, and a different want to acknowledge mental illness is only concocted up by Big Pharma.

The ones we should persuade are the ones who hasn’t made up their minds.

So… is it that, in their eyes, these cultures aren’t doing gender roles properly? Where we, being modern and sophisticated and Western, and thus better than everyone else who has ever lived, intrinsically “get” gender? That our gender roles are clearly “natural”, where everyone else’s are artificial and skewed?

Clearly the baseline for any cultural or psychological norm is the white undergraduate US student.

I think that one of the bigger problems of Feminism is being often confused, by misinformed people, has some kind of equivalent to machismo.
I, until my 18-19 years old, thought the same that too much people still think today: feminism like some kind of “woman superiority movement”.

In all fairness, feminists did kinda duck into the punch on that. The ship’s sailed though.

I once tried to read up on radical feminism, and that was …um… fun (like “penetration is rape”).

In nearly all cases, that was someone being misquoted while saying (perhaps clumsily) something in the vein of “a ‘yes’ is only meaningful if a ‘no’ would be accepted.”

The worst example of feminism’s enemies getting to define that I’ve seen was a student of mine who said, “I’m not a feminist, I just think that men and women should be treated equally.” Yeah, I told him, that’s actually what feminism means — if someone tells you different, you might be a bit suspicious.

This is an appalling article by Soh, especially coming from a neuroscientist. That paper that showed 93% predictability? Here’s the conclusion: “We wholly agree that a strict dichotomy between male/female brains does not exist, but this does not diminish or negate the importance of considering statistical differences between the sexes (e.g., including sex as a covariate in morphometric analyses).” In other words, the authors REPUDIATED the idea that the brain is strictly classifiable as male vs. female based on neuroanatomy.

Also, Soh is IMHO egregiously misleading about Steensma et al’s 2001 paper, which she describes as “In one 2011 study of 25 gender dysphoric children, 11 desisted. Of the desisters, two had socially transitioned and regretted it.” If these number are correct, that still means that only 2 out of 25 transgender children regretted transitioning, which is hardly an good argument against it.

But it turns out we can’t actually use the numbers the way Soh asserts we can because this was a qualitative, not a quantitative study of 25 respondents out of 198 children who had been referred to a Dutch Gender Identity Clinic and so did not and could not draw any conclusions about the frequency of regretting transitioning. She’s essentially taken a study where the researchers have interviewed past clients to see if they can help identify people who will regret transitioning, and has presented it as an argument against transitioning itself.

The key giveaway is that Soh is only concerned about the “serious consequences” of people coming to regret transitioning but does not mention the extensive literature on the serious consequences of not being allowed to transition.

clamboy@16 — it’s TERFy because it makes a straw man out of both transgender activists and “gender feminism” (i.e. the theory that gender roles are partly socially and culturally determined), uses scientific misrepresentation to argue that transgender people are really deep down defined sexually by their neuroanatomy, that transitioning is a bad thing that should be resisted, and that if you disagree with any of this you are refuting basic biology.

There are three main approaches to psychological intervention with gender diverse children including a “gender affirmative” approach, a “wait and see if these behaviors desist” approach, or actively discouraging gender non-conforming behavior. The gender affirmative model is grounded in the evidence-based idea that attempting to change or contort a person’s gender does harm. Psychological interventions should aim to help children understand that their gender identity and gender expression are not a problem. Providers should aim to non-judgmentally accept the child’s gender presentation and help children build resilience and become more comfortable with themselves, without attempting to change or eliminate cross-gender behavior. Children who experience affirming and supportive responses to their gender identity are more likely to have improved mental health outcomes. Gender identity is resistant, if not impervious to environmental manipulation. Moreover, attempts to change a child’s gender may have a negative impact on the child’s well-being.

But Soh seems to be suggesting, in the penultimate paragraph, that children should not be allowed to transition socially, which is identical to trying to change the child’s gender identity (to that assigned at birth).

In PG Wodehouse’s novel Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, there is a character called Rev. Harold Pinker. When he was in high school and college, his friends and classmates called him by the nickname “Stinker”–“Stinker Pinker”.

Unfortunately, I have some experience with TERFs, and I think only two of your four things are TERFy.

makes a straw man out of both transgender activists and “gender feminism” (i.e. the theory that gender roles are partly socially and culturally determined)

I never came across a TERF who didn’t argue that gender is entirely sociocultural stereotypes.

uses scientific misrepresentation to argue that transgender people are really deep down defined sexually by their neuroanatomy

I also never came across a TERF who accepted neuroanatomy had anything to do with being transgender, in the sense of being “born this way”. They usually portray trans women as either mentally ill (due to some trauma), or deceptive cisgender predators. (Trans men are usually not on their radar at all, or explained away as women pretending to be men to escape patriarchy.)

Your other two things:

transitioning is a bad thing that should be resisted, and that if you disagree with any of this you are refuting basic biology.

It’s always rather confusing to hear people bemoan the irreversible effects of hormone replacement therapy during puberty while completely ignoring the irreversible effects of that same person’s naturally produced hormones. I mean geez, being trans that person would have quite probably benefitted from HRT even before birth and several difficult-to-reverse body changes have already been afflicted on them. It’s always going to be an “I need this not only today, but some 11 years, nine months ago.”
Waiting for bone structure and further secondary sex characteristics to finish developing before deciding to help is just irresponsible, especially with the availability of fully-reversible puberty blockers to delay the process..
=8)-DX

SilentBob — I bow to your greater experience with TERFism (and you have my condolences). But I’m going to stick with all four of my points because:

1. Making straw opponents out of transgender activism and “gender feminism” is still being TERFy even if the particular straw man isn’t commonly used by other TERFs.

2. I’m not sure who you’ve been conversing with, but my understanding is that most TERFs insist on the biological/chromosomal definition of gender which is part of their sticking point on why XY can’t be female.

3. Soh played a neat little logical shell trick: she wasn’t claiming that transgenderism is neuroanatomically determined. She was claiming that gender is, and puts this forward as an argument against transgenderism, i.e.: if brains can be reliably identified as male or female based on MRI then transgenderism can’t really be a thing because a person is a man or a woman depending on brain structure.

(It’s also interesting to look at the reference she uses here. It’s free online at http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1968.full.pdf and you can see some interesting limitations: (1) it’s only a letter not a full paper, so there is only a very perfunctory description of the method, (2) the measurements were taken from a public database and no critical analysis went into how each brain’s sex was identified or why this complex identifier was recorded as a simple binary categorical variable; the gender was simply taken as given, (3) when they regressed out all head-size related measurements their predictive power dropped from 93% to 70% — in other words a huge amount of the predictive value on MRI was derived from head size and not from structural differences. I stress that I am not raising these limitations to criticise the authors — they were not putting this forward as an argument about the nature of transgenderism. But, of course, I don’t expect Soh ever read the letter, just plonked it in her “supports my position” folder.)

Delusions of Gender is definitely not trans-antagonistic. It would only come across that way if one subscribes to “gendered brain” nonsense. In fact Fine’s work supports conceiving of developmental biology as a continuum and suggests that the vast majority of baggage we associate gender (and sex, if someone hasn’t teased apart the phenomenon) is self-referential nonsense. It’s more a stinging indictment of gender roles and doesn’t really broach the subject of trans folk at all.

Ichthyic: What article are you talking about? The one I linked to is dated February 10, 2017.

ChasCPeterson: Gametic sex is all we care about when doing genetic crosses, that is entirely true. It’s also irrelevant here, because transgender people are not claiming that they can think themselves into producing eggs or sperm, and neither is anyone demanding that people produce a semen sample or ovulate before they are allowed to use a public restroom. It also creates new problems: are menopausal women women anymore? Is a vasectomy equivalent to a sex change?

Would you agree, PZ Myers, that if there are statistically measurable differences in brain morphology and/or gene expression between biologically male and biologically female brains that there might also be statistical differences in behavior at least partially attributable to biology?

Essentialism is the root of all evil. Some people just hang on to their preconceived worldviews and then add “because science” because of course they can’t admit their worldviews are preconceived.
They choose not to see that, though sex chromosomes, sex hormones, sex organs and other sex differences may be given facts, they do not necessarily define what sex someone is.
Biologists are in the advantage of actually studying biology and knowing firsthand that reality is almost always a lot more complex than our worldviews dictate us.

chris61: What exactly do you mean by “biologically male” and “biologically female” brains?

That there might be some statistical differences in behavior between AFAB and AMAB people seems likely. Any time you divide a population into two groups, you’re going to find statistical differences. It seems likely that some of those differences will be “at least partially attributable to biology.” So IMHO, your question is not an interesting one.

The problem is teasing out what role biology plays in each of those differences. This has proven to be very, very difficult.

Also, keep in mind that “statistical differences” say nothing at all about individuals. That’s perhaps the biggest problem with gender essentialism.

Another big problem with discussions about “transgenderism” is that it’s mostly conducted by people who have no clue about what being transgender is like or is about. The voices and stories of transgender people are mostly overridden by cis “experts,” who historically have attempted to force them into cisgender narratives, or by cisgender sensationalizers, who twist transgender people’s experiences into tropes simple enough for cis people to repeat — e.g., the “woman trapped in a man’s body” trope.

And there’s one question that I don’t see addressed in these discussions: why is it anyone else’s business how people choose to live their lives? The only “harm” that trans people do is to not fit into people’s preconceptions of how people have to be based on whether there’s an M or an F on their birth certificate. Just about everywhere that transgender people have gone, their presence has been a non-issue among those who deal with them on a daily basis. I recently went full-time, and really nothing has changed aside from my name, how I dress, and which bathroom I use. That’s why the transphobes have had to make up myths (the “bathroom predator” myth, the “destroying moral values” myth, etc.) to justify repressive laws and coercive medical treatments.

If people (like Debra Soh or Kenneth Zucker or Paul McHugh or Cathy Brennan) didn’t run around perverting “science” to justify their bigoted holy wars, there would be no need for transgender activists to talk about science. And transgender people would be about as remarkable as dyed hair. (Do people who dye their hair have different brains from the ones who don’t? Troo Sigh-ense wants to know.)

Would you agree, PZ Myers, that if there are statistically measurable differences in brain morphology and/or gene expression between biologically male and biologically female brains that there might also be statistical differences in behavior at least partially attributable to biology?

NO. That’s bad science.

Think of it this way. If I separated a sample set into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people, went looking for statistically measurable differences in brain morphology and/or gene expression between them, could I then correlate those with statistical differences in their behavior and claim that I’d found a biological basis for whatever random association I’d discovered?

I say that as someone who is fairly confident that there ARE biological predispositions to some aspects of behavior, we just aren’t sure what they are. I am even more confident that going on a statistical snipe hunt is a terrible way to figure them out.

Jumping in before reading the entire thread; to share my measly thought.
“Gender” is a word that can be used in two seperate ways. Personal and impersonal. Gender as a construct is the impersonal while gender is inherent is the more personal. As in a person talking of their own personal sense of gender is inherent within them. Society telling people which gender they are is the impersonal and merely a construct.
Sheesh this device sux so enough for now

Minor linguistic point: in spanish, activista is by graceful royal exemption one of those fortunate words that don’t have a gender forced into them. So you can say “los activistas” o “las activistas”, or in this case simply omit the pronoun off if you don’t feel like segregating your subject by gender.

Saying “activistos” however is a felony in all spanish-speaking countries, surpassed only by saying “no problemo”.

Think of it this way. If I separated a sample set into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people, went looking for statistically measurable differences in brain morphology and/or gene expression between them, could I then correlate those with statistical differences in their behavior and claim that I’d found a biological basis for whatever random association I’d discovered?

Of course, correlation does not imply causation but without further study neither can one dismiss all correlation as being spurious.

if there are statistically measurable differences in brain morphology and/or gene expression between biologically male and biologically female brains that there might also be statistical differences in behavior at least partially attributable to biology?

What you’re describing is a Matrioshka Doll situation. A society, where external identification of a person happens by their race first, than their gender, and then by their sexual orientation or gender identity. You identify as, and is in fact a person who is in the last “doll”, to mean: besides social conservatives who hate change, others may also be intolerant, who are not racist or sexist, but still don’t tolerate or fear LGBT people. Just as much, some members within the LGBT community are social conservatives and/or intolerant toward a group under their umbrella.

Having a similar majority means a comfort zone, which is seen by a number of people as being challenged by those who are different, and that superficial difference is enough to invoke fear, and fear leads to the creation of myths. Those who can’t or won’t challenge their comfort zone don’t bother to see the difference between the LGBT community, bronies and the otherkin.This leads to the legitimate question, why aren’t others targeted by it? It doesn’t involve physical change, which is the basis for the second fear. A great deal of people build a sense of identity on their race, gender and creed. They feel that challenging what makes us human is not, and cannot be normal. It is perceived as if a person identifies as a cat, and refuse to live any other way, than a cat.

Infusing compassion into humans by current scientific and ethical standards is not possible, so the next best thing is to pass on vital biological knowledge. There’s no blueprint for giving birth to a boy or a girl, just as much there’s no way of accurately determining which sperm will fertilize the egg, and which combination of the 2 parents the baby will look like (not including heteropaternal superfecundation, where there are 3 parents). The discrimination you’re facing is what influenced people to write holy books about gods. The LGBT community knows it very well, that not having a religion does not mean, an ignorant person can’t replace sky daddy with the omnipotence of biology, since the need for a narrative to make sense in life is not exclusive to religion.

What makes us equal is sentience, consciousness, and the ability of abstract thought. Unfortunately not everyone thinks that way yet, and until larger groups aren’t freed of discrimination by the same people, it will stay being hardly bearable for smaller groups.

Of course, correlation does not imply causation but without further study neither can one dismiss all correlation as being spurious.

You ignored the next paragraph in PZ’s comment.

One can research the hell out of anything. Experience has shown that going on fishing expeditions for correlations (“snipe hunts”) ends up misleading the researchers into thinking they have something when they don’t. Yes, in principle one could find a real connection that no one has found before. And if you toss a jar of ink in the air, the resulting splatters might give you the works of Shakespeare. But it’s not very likely.

Note also that the differences between the “male brain” and “female brain” are very, very slight.

Note also that gene expression is affected by environment. In particular, it is known that brain development depends upon the experiences the person undergoes. So at the end, you still couldn’t rule out environment in any male/female differences.

“When the estimates of the size of the transgender population range from 0.3% to almost 0.8%, saying that your magic MRI machine has a wobble of 7% leaves a lot of leeway.”

I’m a bit leery of using statistical outliers — and .8% is a statistical outlier — to make or contradict general rules. It’s one thing to say (and I do) that transgendered people are entitled to equal legal rights. It’s another thing entirely to say that the existence of a tiny handful of people who are an exception to the otherwise universal rule that people are either male or female tells us anything about the validity of that otherwise universal rule. When something is true of 99.2% of the population (even using the high number of estimated transgendered in the population), I think the better assumption is that the outliers are just that — outliers.

Handwaving away the exceptions to your rule does not justify maintaining belief in that rule because now it ceases to be a rule and starts to be a frickin guideline. Attitudes like this are precisely why so many trans people used to live (in some cases, still live) in a constant quasi-legal state, neither legislated against or legislated in favour of. So I think, for the purposes of clarity and justice, that we need to stop dismissing gender variance as unimportant because it’s uncommon.

there might also be statistical differences in behavior at least partially attributable to biology?

Here’s an idea: Instead of proposing some vague “might be” you simply tell us which behaviour and then produce the evidence. Because why on earth should anybody spend their time on talking about this on the level of “might”? There might be aliens out there in the universe, intelligent life. That doesn’t mean I spend much time thinking about them nor do I entertain the idea that the chaos in my living room was caused by some big headed green skinned creatures in glittery suits.

Your 99.2% includes other anomalies, and thus cannot be or should not be used as basis. People with Klinefelt-syndrome have an additional X chromosome, women with Turner-syndrome have but one X chromosome, not to mention that we all start out as female, so there’s nothing universal or “set in stone” about being either male or female.

In agreement with AMM here, the environment where we get our experiences is crucial, to use a bad analogy, our brains are the hard drive upon which the experience settles down as an operating system. What you see as a special status is just ignoring that we cis people are also different to each other.

Say I have two groups of lab mice: one group with dark fur and the other has light fur. As an experiment, I raise 50 dark-fur mice in a warm cage, and 50 light-fur mice are raised in a cool cage.

After 1 year, I end the experiment, and make the following observations:
* Using a stimulus/response test, I find the warm-cage / dark-fur mice to be about 10% more likely (p<0.02) to measure "highly aggressive" than their cool-cage / light-fur counterparts.
* I develop a technique which can differentiate the brain structures of dark-fur mice from their light-fur counterparts with 93% accuracy (p<0.001).

What does the first results say about the relative aggressiveness of dark fur mice vs white fur mice?
What does the second result say about innate brain differences between dark fur mice and white fur mice?

Hopefully everyone gets the same answer to both: zilch. In fact, even before seeing my results, it should've been quite evident that my experimental design had no chance of shedding any light on these questions. This is PZ's point.

Why do so many people think science works differently when the topic is gender and the subjects are human?

I have never seen a twin study that was worth paying attention to — they tend to be heavily biased, and never properly control for all the variables (that part isn’t their fault, they can’t).

Highest rate of “determination” for homosexuality that I’ve seen is ~50% concordance in identical twins, ~20% in fraternal twins (and that was a study that pre-selected for one twin being gay). So half the time identical twins have different sexual orientations, if one is gay. That says to me that homosexuality might have a genetic predisposition, but in the absence of controls for environmental influences I’d call it more of a weak suggestion.

Given the complexity of of not only genetics, but of developmental biology and environmental factors having effects on both the mother and the fetus during development, I personally would be very leery of decreeing anything about genetic biology without excellent data that ties your claims to actual genes that were active during development and working properly. What happens if the regulatory genes don’t react properly to the increased levels of hormones? Delayed growing of penis and gender misidentity; there are known cases.

If the attempts to change sexual orientation are coercive, that would be torture regardless of the basis of the behavior but what if it were merely encouragement. Similar say to how society is supposed to encourage more women to go into STEM because we believe that the dearth of women in STEM is not a reflection of inate biological differences but of socialization.

In part you just answered kevinkirkpatrick’s question. Socialization, and expectations based on them can determine how we act, especially if our actions are comfortable in a community.

In cases, where one or both parents are emotionally distant or inept at parenting, the children develop poor social skills, which in turn gravitates them toward jobs, where they don’t have to deal with others humans, or humans with whom they don’t share a common interest with, STEM being one example. It’s the argument, that only theirs is hard science, and they belittle sciences involving humans, as that’s too much of an effort.

In other words you argue for a situation, that is only unilaterally comfortable and beneficial to you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman, most people don’t like to work with a-holes, it’s not a biological difference, rather a lack of self reflection, which is funny, as science should be conducted in theory without resorting to biases that influence the outcome.

As for Nerd’s attached article, it clearly states, that the boys were boys in the womb through normal development, but a genetic deficiency stunted them, their actions weren’t predisposed, it’s something they wanted to do. A tomboy does the same thing, and yet nothing predisposes her, just like there is no predisposition as to which action is being taken in a fight or flight response. https://now.uiowa.edu/2013/02/human-brain-divided-fear-and-panic You say, it could be just an encouragement, except it still leads back to internal fear or discomfort, thus how myths are made, and it’s the path we are moving away from, not towards it.

Similar say to how society is supposed to encourage more women to go into STEM because we believe that the dearth of women in STEM is not a reflection of inate biological differences but of socialization.

We know that women can be as fully capable of doing science as men. The whole idea of inate [sic] biological differences driving differential success in STEM is absurd — it’s also refuted by the fact that women are rapidly catching up to men in pursuing STEM careers in many fields. Unless you want to argue that the STEM genes are suddenly rapidly spreading through the population, we can’t explain the prior lower enrollments with something genetic.

So if homosexuality doesn’t have a genetic predisposition why is it wrong for parents to attempt to modify their children’s behavior?

Basically: because it’s harmful. Anything about “genetics or not” is a red herring to that kind of fact.

You appear to be assuming that if something isn’t genetic (or whatever) then it is “silly putty” (to borrow Steven Pinker’s metaphor, ironically), that it is never settled, and/or you can shape it however you want (at any time) without consequence. But there’s another possibility: that past experience can cause a person’s mind to become rather rigid in some way. So that future efforts to shape it will not work.

So if homosexuality doesn’t have a genetic predisposition why is it wrong for parents to attempt to modify their children’s behavior?

Man, you have been an unending font of idiocy in this thread.

Lots of things lack genetic predispositions. We don’t use the presence or absence of a gene to justify modifying children’s behavior; we do it on the basis of what helps them grow up to be healthy, well-adjusted, happy members of society. There are many factors that can influence a child’s interests and preferences, and even if something is not genetic it may be a strong part of someone’s personality.

I don’t think an interest in biology has a genetic component. Would it therefore have been OK for me to ignore my children’s desires (none of them wanted to study biology) and force them to get degrees and careers in my field? There’s no genetic factors, so gosh, that means I have carte blanche on manipulating my kids’ minds.

We know that not all differential success in STEM is driven by innate biological differences but it would be absurd to conclude that we know that none of it is. (Such differences might not affect capabilities but might affect preferences). If none of it is biologically driven then we might indeed expect to one day achieve equal participation. If some of the difference is driven by biological differences then the only way to achieve equal participation will be either through coercion or through modifying biology.

PZ, I agree it’s bad science to erase the outliers, but I also think that there’s a danger in reading more into them than what’s actually there. Unfortunately in the case of the transgendered, they have and continue to suffer vicious, nasty harassment and stigmatization such that it’s probably even harder to objectively evaluate the data than it is for other outliers.

If instead of the transgendered we were discussing the occasional person who is born with six digits on each hand rather than five, I very much doubt that anyone would try to draw conclusions about human hands in general from the fact that a miniscule number of people don’t conform to the general rule of five digits. But then, people with six digits aren’t treated badly by the legal system, the religious nuts and the culture in general the way the transgendered are. They aren’t told which bathrooms to use and they aren’t treated as sexual predators by Fox News and Company. So the existence of people with six digits can be discussed in a non-judgmental, objective fashion with no real baggage attached.

I suspect that among some here, the science is allowed to be clouded by the entirely laudable desire to make life better for the transgendered. But to the extent that that is the case, that’s politics and not science. Over 99% of the population is firmly and comfortably and unchangeably one gender or the other in every way that matters. Honest question then: If the less than 1% that is not tells us anything about the 99%, what is it? How does the existence of a trans person tell us anything about the 99% who are cis?

If none of it is biologically driven then we might indeed expect to one day achieve equal participation. If some of the difference is driven by biological differences then the only way to achieve equal participation will be either through coercion or through modifying biology.

Close, but not quite. That would require ALL of it to be driven by a biological difference. Because if only some of it is, then you could perhaps theoretically use the rest (the part that is not biologically determined) to un-coercively bend the ratio to equality. It isn’t guaranteed, but it can’t be ruled out.

Not that this really matters. Even if you were right, I’m not even sure why you thought that needed to be said. My first thought was “duh, whatever”.

I have never seen a twin study that was worth paying attention to — they tend to be heavily biased, and never properly control for all the variables (that part isn’t their fault, they can’t).

I have, but such were *anything* but behavioral or sociological or even sexual orientation, they were in specific birth defect issues and discussed genetics and identical twin differentiation. Well, for a third, which wasn’t mentioned initially, but occurred to me as i was writing, the two confirmed a founder effect that was isolated, replicated and hence, confirmed in a specific genetic disease.

Sexual behavior is, to my understanding (please correct me with peer reviewed studies if I’m off course), is behavioral and somewhat sociological. An individual can “correct” behavior and “preference” (in that specific context) to accord with a rejecting society. For optimal satisfaction, one would follow one’s preference, good for the overwhelming majority for both individual and society, bad for the latter two if the individual was a homicidal, serial killer maniac.
The reality is, humans are bloodthirsty pack/herd animals, attacking and if allowed, killing those who are “different”.
Those who are different, well, let’s adopt an older phrase, “The Other”.
That’s age worn now, to some extent, but still true.

The Other was a real threat in ancient village environments, that Other could bring in diseases that could kill off an entire village and more.
So, we evolved a behavioral trend, which survived multiple cultures, due to convergent evolution of behavior.
Laughable is the objection to homosexual males being evil and homosexual females being cool in our society, considering the aforementioned and massively abbreviated foreground above.
Alas, it’s late and I’m also unwilling to provide a blog into a blog response, despite my already well known and infamous garrulous responses.

That said from a personal context in the real world of, peck kisses, no biggie, did that in Wahhabi Islam nations with my wife of now 355+ years, erm, I mean 35 years. ;)
Got amused looks, acceptance of our mutual grey beards.
Oddly, a lot of respect to both of us as well. We’ve never quite figured it out, save if marriage is short lived, which was not our understanding in the overwhelming majority of the populace.

I think that i’ve overexpressed myself here in one area, reactive, vs analytical.
In the real world, I use both extensively. I’m overwhelmingly friendly, I’m also analyzing you, your body language, your use of language, nuances and more.
On one side, there’s the Incredible Hulk response, that was the least frequent response. I failed to find common ground and things turned into dogshit.
The more often response was and remains, people telling me or us, their problems and asking for help.
We’ve never been a able to turn down a request for review, helping, well, if you’re right or not wrong, not much of a problem, wrong, we’d and I’d offer a suggestion (actually, usually, we offered suggestions).

But, I digress into nearly a blog and this one ain’t mine and I’m far from interested in a high frequency blog.

Enough said.
Indeed, it’s been my own, direct and personal experience that women make exceptional managers, finding minutiae that I and my male peers missed.
There’s also a lack of testosterone response to same sex peerage that is unfortunately common in male peers.
Again, that’s only my own anecdotal experience. Several times over.

One specific instance stands out, where the manager hired her replacement, as she set up service centers, then hired replacement managers.
As a former Marine, she hired a stop-loss retired Marine, who replaced her and turned the center into a living hell for everyone else.
First, he jogged around the place. Big deal, cool for him.
Then, he introduced a “Duty Rooster”, which set the scene for bad things later, mutually.
I tossed it into the trash, as it was obviously not a corporate document. Of course, directly within his eyesight and explained, dutifully.
That was during the build-up of Gulf War I.
I actually had HR cowering in the corner, while he actually started to reach out over his desk for my throat.
Both careers in that company ended that day, my own a bit after he departed.

I’m an asshole, but not an unreasoning kind. I’ll happily be an asshole for a reasonable cause.
I found a better job not long after, he didn’t. Not that I really cared, he might’ve learned something.
I learned more.
Which has always been my daily goal in life anyway.
Today, I’m making three times as much, in temporal equivalent terms. Not enough, considering my qualifications, but I did take a handful of years off from my incessantly changing career field to care for my dying father.
That’s worth more to my wife and I far more than our house mass in platinum.
That, despite the pain of watching him wane from vascular dementia.

Even though I accept the possibility that there might be genetic differences in behavior between the sexes, why should I buy into the idea that they align with traditional cultural attitudes about gender roles?

Further, why should I buy into the idea that men are genetically more suited to science than women? Modern scientific practice has only been around for a few centuries, so there’s no guarantee that the skills needed to be effective at it align with anything that men and women have been selected for over the past few thousand years.

Also, there’s a significant part of biology that the anti-trans brigade itself ignores. Pretty much all of the secondary sexual characteristics we use to identify peoples’ genders are induced by hormones during puberty. I’m pretty sure that the most common form of gender reassignment is hormone therapy. A significant component of biological gender is in fact mutable.

If some of the difference is driven by biological differences then the only way to achieve equal participation will be either through coercion or through modifying biology.

Christ.

NONE of us are “biologically” adapted to do science. Science is a recent cultural innovation. Is Richard Dawkins the product of coercion or modified biology? Are these the only two possibilities you can imagine, that someone is forced to do something against their will or you have to do gene-hacking to reshape their brains? Jesus, but you’re an idiot.

Two more points:

The goal isn’t equal participation. It’s equal opportunity to participate. The only coercion here is from regressive twits who try to constrain opportunities for women.

We constantly modify our biology — some of us are scientists (or bricklayers or teachers or artists or mathematicians) in spite of the fact that we’re adapted to be hunter/gatherers. The first thing I did when I got up this morning was to modify my biology by putting on clothes and drinking coffee.

@emergence #71: I have a single issue, and it’s with the time frame defining modern scientific practice as being around for centuries. Enlightenment is, but I can’t overlook the fact, that the cause of women dying at childbirth from fever has been researched and found in the 1840s, yet it took until Pasteur to finally introduce sterilization, 4 decades later. A century ago, the official scientific consensus was, based on no research at all, that periods vastly affect women, not just in behavior, but also in brain chemistry, thus they’re incapable to be intellectuals. 85 years ago Cornelius Rhoads infected people with cancer, and in the ’50s, he became vice president of ACS.

Modern scientific practice, in my book at least, begins with identifying HIV as a non-gay disease, that can be transmitted in other ways, than sexual, as that finding lacked racial, sexual and homophobic bias, which should be the default attitude.

It tells us about the 99% who are cis that they are not the only ones in this world. TERFs tell us to ignore the outliers because they are outliers. That’s just as silly as ignoring the 99% because they are 99%. It’s a non-sequitur, and a nasty one.

Yes, this comment is political too. That’s because the entire question is political. It’s the TERFs who want you to believe it’s plain science.

Behaviors that are biologically determined? Homosexuality for one. Autism for another.

You don’t even realise that neither Homosexuality nor Autism are behaviours, do you?
Besides, you’re also making statements without evidence. Show me the genes for autism, show me the genes for homosexuality. Both things are so damn complicated that it’s often pretty hard to define anyway (and we’ve had several discussions about this)

We know that not all differential success in STEM is driven by innate biological differences but it would be absurd to conclude that we know that none of it is.

As I said, I’m pretty open to the hypothesis that some difference in interest in STEM between men and women is biological. Now you must define which aspect and show the evidence.
Back to square one: I will not entertain discussions on the basis of “there might be”. Put up or shut up.

rietpluim, I don’t think the 1% should be ignored if we’re talking politics. Legally and politically, the 1% is entitled to equal rights and fair treatment. I’ve said nothing to the contrary.

But if we’re talking science, I don’t see how something that occurs in 99% of the population is on the same plane as something that only occurs in 1% of the population, and I sure don’t see how you can draw any general conclusions from something that rare. Suppose a scientific study showed that 1% of Republicans were decent human beings. Would your conclusions about Republicans focus on the 1%, or on the 99% who are not?

Chris61: “Would you agree, PZ Myers, that if there are statistically measurable differences in brain morphology and/or gene expression between biologically male and biologically female brains that there might also be statistical differences in behavior at least partially attributable to biology?”

Your premise is not only wrong, but laughably misguided. First, merely scanning male and female brains for “statistical differences” and then post hoc trying to explain differences in STEM participation/achievement is a recipe for self delusion. Unless you can point to areas in the brain necessary for scientific success and then look at brains and ascertain significant differences, you are only telling Just-So stories meant to suppress curiosity, rather than stimulate it (the ultimate in anti-science) Moreover, I could just as easily point to sex differences that ought to make women better scientists (e.g. a denser corpus callosum leading to better coordination between brain hemispheres).

Here’s a clue. The brain is really, really complicated. The brains of any two individuals are as different as the faces of any two individuals, and these differences are more significant than the average differences you wish to use to explain differences in STEM participation.

I would suggest you do some research on the brain, but then you wouldn’t have those just-so stories to keep you from thinking.

It was suggested upthread that between .3% and .8% of humans are transgender. If we’re going to ignore the “outliers”, does that mean we should ignore the experiences and needs of between 2.2 million and 5.9 million people?

Will you at least start using the word “transgender” as an adjective? The phrase “the transgendered” is cringeworthy. We don’t refer to a group of black people as “the blackened” or short people “the shortened.”

I sure don’t see how you can draw any general conclusions from something that rare.

It’s a specific conclusion and not a general one that devbio is not something that can be reduced to an on/off switch. We see this idea being mandated in bathroom bills for frack sake. Of course it’s in our interest to point out that no model of devbio is complete unless it accounts for all of devbio.

If we’re going to ignore the “outliers”, does that mean we should continue toignore the experiences and needs of between 2.2 million and 5.9 million people?

FTFY.

If you think only refugees get closely vetted, you’ve never tried to transition. We are poked and prodded mentally and physically, expected to conform to cis people’s expectations of who we ought to be, and so much more, all so we can get “permission” from society to change our presentation.

Then cis people have lengthy discussion threads where we talk about how important it is to understand and value the experience of cis people. It all feels kinda othering (not from everyone on the thread, just those talking pseudo knowledgeably about things they are evidently ignorant of).

Just, y’know, if it matters. Go on, chris61, you were Just Asking Questions, I believe?

But if we’re talking science, I don’t see how something that occurs in 99% of the population is on the same plane as something that only occurs in 1% of the population, and I sure don’t see how you can draw any general conclusions from something that rare.

Then you aren’t thinking scientifically. What would you say about, say a QM calculation that shows only a 0.1% chance of something happening? And then it is found that it happens on rare occasions? It is not scientific to ignore all the processes that can and do happen. Transgender people exist; they can’t be ignored, if you are going to be scientific. You either accept it, both legally and scientifically, or you have a problem that you need to deal with.
Example from PZ’s class. Genetics aren’t always Mendelian. You may need to over simplify for an introductory class, but the simple model presented is still scientifically wrong, as it ignores the fullness of reality.

rietpluim, I don’t think the 1% should be ignored if we’re talking politics. Legally and politically, the 1% is entitled to equal rights and fair treatment. I’ve said nothing to the contrary.
But if we’re talking science, I don’t see how something that occurs in 99% of the population is on the same plane as something that only occurs in 1% of the population, and I sure don’t see how you can draw any general conclusions from something that rare.”

Maybe understanding the 1% can teach you something that is relevant to the 99% as well. Outliers are sometimes a rare and precious gift from the tails of the distribution that tell you something about the distribution as a whole.

I may be a cis and hetero, but I do belong to a similarly small group of people, who are born with tinnitus, and die with. Since there’s no medication, that could help all of us, much less a cure, even in places, where it’s covered by health insurance and isn’t a preexisting condition, the number of snakeoil salesmen is very high. I don’t find that surprising, it does affect every tenth person on a global scale, and among them 2% find it unbearable.

How easily an issue can be ignored or exploited derives from how socially conscious a society is. If it’s capable to ignore a quarter of its entire population suffering from pollen allergies, it’s not a stretch to imagine, they care less for people with smaller political representation.

I did not say that we should ignore the needs of transgendered individuals; I already said twice that thinking politically and thinking scientifically are not the same thing, and my comments are restricted to the science of it, not the politics. Politically, I absolutely agree that the needs of transgendered people need to be addressed and that they are entitled to being protected from harassment and discrimination. That, however, is a separate question from whether we make general scientific rules based on outliers. And if I seem to be repeating myself, it’s because some here seem not to be drawing that distinction. And I haven’t said we shouldn’t try to understand the 1%; just that the tail does not wag the dog, and the outliers do not define the study results. And that’s the last time I’m going to say it; if someone doesn’t get it, they don’t get it.

Nerd, I have not denied that transgender people exist or that they can’t be learned from, but since you conflate scientific thinking with political thinking I’m also not prepared to take seriously your comment that I’m not thinking scientifically. In response to your QM hypo, the law of large numbers dictates that given enough time and the right conditions, anything that can happen will happen, but that doesn’t mean the result is anything other than an outlier.

I did not say that we should ignore the needs of transgendered individuals; I already said twice that thinking politically and thinking scientifically are not the same thing

And people have pointed out that your scientific thinking sucks. If 1% of your group simply do not fit into the neat simplistic schema you developed then the problem is with your schema. If a medication really helps against the common cold in 99% of cases but kills the remaining 1%, do you declare it a safe medication because declaring it potentially lethal would be “the tail wagging the dog”?

Maybe we need to get back to basic logic. “All swans are white”. How many black swans do I need to prove you wrong?

Nope asshole, you are fallaciously putting words in my mouth. Why can you accept trans people politically, but not scientifically? I have no problem with either. That is YOUR problem and you get there by trying to over simplify the science. I don’t over simplify the science, and fully understand the messiness of the developmental process. I’ve been at science for 40+ years, so take your bullshit elsewhere.

It’s interesting to note how the author of the quote conflates sex and gender to make the opposing strawpeople seem even more ridiculous, since feminists apparently

instead promote the idea that sex differences are caused by a socialization process that begins at birth

indicating that those straw-folks believe being socialized in the opposite manner would cause your physical sex to change by itself, as though the delivering physician could reverse the newborn’s sex by just saying “wait, nevermind, it’s a ____, go home and replace that “.
The other option is that the authors themselves believe that sex and gender are identical, and that they’d explode if they tried to defy stereotypes (or would be transformed).

@PZ #72, I say that it is indeed biological.
In each and every “mover and shaker” in science, something was different.
It obviously wasn’t genetic, that’s been tried and failed so often during the eugenics era of idiocy, that it’s obvious that it’s a failed notion.
Something happens during migration, differentiation and stratification or more confounding, during development, which continues after birth, to account for that vastly different and special person.
So, we agree on one point, it’s a far more complicated question than the idiot brigade try to lead with.

Which makes each and every one, despite origin, unique, special resources, of whom untold thousands are being wasted via lack of education and resources.

If a medication really helps against the common cold in 99% of cases but kills the remaining 1%, do you declare it a safe medication because declaring it potentially lethal would be “the tail wagging the dog”?

I think we would declare it safe, and simply note that that 1% ought not use it. For example, a number of people are allergic to various antibiotics, but we consider them very safe medications and hospitals always simply ask if the patient is allergic to any of them when admitting them. We certainly wouldn’t say that any medication doesn’t actually help against the common cold because there is an identifiable 1% for whom it doesn’t hold and that 1% is discriminated against because of those very traits that make the medication not work. Instead, we’d treat the medication like we do penicillin, recall the relevant scientific facts, and point out that those scientific facts are utterly irrelevant to any discussions of their political or social status.

The same thing applies here. If 99% of people be easily divided into the two biological sexes, then that seems like a reasonable and practical classification system. For the 1% who don’t, some resolution is required, and they shouldn’t be ignored scientifically, but there’s no reason to say that they prove that the classification system is invalid, unreasonable, problematic or needs to be changed any more than, say, it would be unreasonable to say that humans have 10 digits on their hands because some are born with 11. What you’d want to make clear is that that scientific classification doesn’t mean anything wrt gender or behaviour, and so the political conclusions that people are drawing from that scientific result aren’t valid. To insist that the science must change simply because what some people think what it says has some political implications is a bad way to do science.

Now, if you can prove that the science is flawed or that the classification isn’t that useful, then that’s valid, but that will be difficult if it gets things right 99% of the time and that classification system aligns with other useful biological results.

I’d kindly disagree. Recently, I’ve looked at alternatives for my condition, so I don’t have to rely on an anti-depressant, and among the non-snake oil salesmen offers I’ve found trimetazidine. Obviously I was thrilled, that at least it would lessen the symptoms and provide a healthy sleep cycle, until it turned out, that 5 years ago, based on concerns in France, and verified by controlled studies, its prescription was discontinued for anything else, but angina pectoris, which I don’t have. The shift occurred mostly because, as it turns out, it can produce Parkinsonian symptoms, so this is at least one instance, where all possible side effects weren’t uncovered in the original trials and thus green lit. While I’m back to square one, I’m at least glad my condition wouldn’t get worse.

If it were up to me, but it isn’t, whenever a new medical breakthrough is achieved, I’d have the previous science tested for anything they might have missed, then again, that’s what long term clinical trials are for.

And you can’t do that by arguing that there are some outliers and insisting that the outliers can’t be ignored. If the outliers are 1% of the total, then the classification is, in fact, generally still useful. Thus, you need a scientific reason beyond that. Which there may well be, but it’s not been given in this thread as far as I can see.

Verbose Stoic, The problem with ignoring the 1% that don’t fit is that they might be telling you something profound that also applies to the entire population. Example: Vioxx seemed to be just fine for most patients as long as you ignored a few outliers. Ultimately, they should have listened to the outliers.

Trans folk may be telling us something very profound about sexual identification. Maybe we cis folk should listen.

Except, if you identify people by XX being female, and XY being male, the anomaly from the perceived norm goes beyond 1%, as it includes, what I mentioned, the Klinefelt-syndrome and the Turner-syndrome, where one is in access or is lacking.

Yet in their cases, frightened, ignorant and bigoted lawmakers don’t go around creating bathroom bills, or assign special police, not that it’s a condone worthy principle. Basing classification on one superficial indicator actually leads to corrupted or biased science. Go no further, than Southeast Asia, where they legally belong to a third gender, and some of them choose prostitution to come up with the funding for reassignment surgery.

Organic systems are prone to failure, so there can’t be a natural that establishes us being a majority is because of a magical blueprint. Not ignoring any outliers should be a given ever since we’ve seen the horrors of human experimentation in WWII. What is statistically insignificant, still means hundreds of thousands of living and breathing humans just in America. Strictly scientifically speaking it’s just as human as being born with an extra toe. Progress is expanding upon the new gained knowledge, and peer review it, not conforming it to former existing models.

And you can’t do that by arguing that there are some outliers and insisting that the outliers can’t be ignored. If the outliers are 1% of the total, then the classification is, in fact, generally still useful.

There’s a big difference between “useful” and “true (to the extend that we deal in “truth”.
How the heck do you think it’s good science to say “oh, look, there’s serious, sound and numerous evidence that goes completely against my model, but instead of changing and adapting ,y theories I will just declare that this evidence doesn’t count”.
What are you, a creationist?